Solotaroff was one of the notable intellectuals of his generation, the founder of the New American Review, editor and friend of Philip Roth, and editor-in-chief at HarperCollins. Solotaroff reveals himself here as a thinking man with a big heart and gaping wounds of love that are not disconnected from the contributions he has made to American culture throughout his career.
Solotaroff turns back to the earliest pages of his romance with Lynn, remembering his first sighting of her emerging from the water as if from a dream. Yet the image, as he penetrates the intervening layers of sorrow and disappointment, is almost impossibly distant, fragile. First Loves reenacts the blurring of a perfect conception in the mind of a man who would devote his life to precision of thought and word. This opposition, of romantic and intellectual passion, drives the narrative and eventually brings it to crisis.
First Loves could be described as a very private feat of honesty from a public intellectual. Solotaroff's willingness to admit the failures, personal and professional, alongside the triumphs of his career gives a three-dimensional intensity to the emotions on the page. Working with all of the gritty and romantic elements of his storied life, Solotaroff manages to avoid a tone too heroic or honey-dipped; he manages simply to tell the tale.

Over the course of sixty years, Alfred Kazin's writings confronted virtually all of our major imaginative writers, from Emerson to Emily Dickinson to James Wright and Joyce Carol Oates -- including such unexpected figures as Lincoln, William James, and Thorstein Veblen. This son of Russian Jews wrote out of the tensions of the outsider and the astute, outspoken leftist -- or, as he put it, "the bitter patriotism of loving what one knows." Editor Ted Solotaroff hasselected material from Kazin's three classic memoirs to accompany his critical writings. Alfred Kazin's America provides an ongoing example of the spiritual freedom, individualism, and democratic contentiousness that he regarded as his heritage and endeavored to pass on.

This landmark anthology brings together some of the best stories written in the last thirty years by and about American Jews. Saul Bellow tells a brutal coming-of-age story set in Chicago; Mark Helprin recalls a stint in the Israeli army during the Six-Day War; Grace Paley explores the complex relationship between Jews and Blacks; Philip Roth muses on what life would have been like for Kafka if he had come to America, and maybe dated Roth's aunt
        
From I.B. Singer's unforgettable depiction of a widower in Miami Beach to Michael Chabon's California-style Jewish wedding and Allegra Goodman's satiric portrayal of a yuppie Orthodox family, a rare view--and one surprising in its diversity--emerges out of the contemporary experience in America.

Planted between Ted and a normal boyhood was Ben Solotaroff, as hard a father to placate, defy, and finally accept as can be found in the annals of the American memoir. Tough, bullying, seductive, Ben Solotaroff was a self-made man "almost all ego and almost no conscience" who made a success of his glass business and a wasteland of his home life. Against a crystalline view of American life in the 1930s and '40s, Truth Comes in Blows places its classic themes the ambivalent love of a son for his victimized mother, the romance of post-immigrant Jews with middle America, sports and masculinity, the guilty imperatives of breaking away and renews them with a candor Philip Roth praised as "not only a literary achievement but a considerable moral achievement as well." A reading group guide is bound into the paperback."

Planted firmly between the young Ted Solotaroff and his entry into the wider world was Ben Solotaroff -- as hard a father to placate, comprehend, and, finally, defy as could be found in the annals of the American memoir. Tough, driven, shrewd, and impossibly overbearing, this self-made man headed off each morning to the Standard Plate Glass Company of Elizabeth, New Jersey, the way George Patton headed off to battle.

Against this formidable adversary stood his mother, Rose, product of the more cultivated Weisses of Cream Ridge, New Jersey, and the Upper West Side. Their marriage was both stormy and sensual, and young Ted came early to understand himself as divided between the "Little Benny" who took after his contentious father and "the Weiss boy" of his mother's affections. His ongoing struggle for self-definition was played out at the family dinner table, classrooms, gyms and baseball fields, and the inner reaches of his psyche.

Truth Comes in Blows takes the classic themes of struggling to maturity and renews them with unsparing intelligence and crystalline particulars. Volumes' worth of insight into what it means to be a man, a son, a Jew, and an American are distilled in its pages into a resonant story of family conflict and hard-won reconciliation.